He said North Korea has tested the limits of patient diplomacy intended to persuade the reclusive communist country to accept international demands and end to its nuclear program.

“Diplomacy has to involve the other side engaging in serious way, and we have not seen that reaction from North Korea,” Obama said. “I don’t think there should be an assumption that we will simply continue down a path in which North Korea is constantly destabilizing the region and we continue to act in the same ways.”

Obama said North Korea’s recent nuclear test and missile launches were provocative. He noted that Russia and China have been more engaged on the matter than in the past, indicating that those countries, too, recognize the possible peril.

Obama spoke after a private meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy in this Normandy city before the leaders commemorated the D-Day invasion that cemented the trans-Atlantic alliance.

“This day marks not only the triumph of freedom but it also marks how the trans-Atlantic alliance has allowed for extraordinary prosperity and security on both sides of the Atlantic,” Obama said.

On other matters of international importance, Sarkozy agreed with Obama’s efforts to bring about a Mideast peace that provides for separate Israeli and Palestinian states, and on the need to thwart Iran’s disputed nuclear ambitions.

“We want peace. We want dialogue. We want to help them develop. But we do not want military nuclear weapons to spread and we are clear on that,” said Sarkozy, who met Wednesday with Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki. “I said to him … that he had to take this hand stretched out by Barack Obama.”

Obama reaffirmed that there must be “tough diplomacy” with Tehran and said Iran’s actions are contrary to its leaders’ insistence that the country does not seek nuclear weapons.

He said he wants to see greater U.S.-Russian efforts to limit nuclear weapons and said that his work against nuclear proliferation and the efforts toward that end by other countries should signal Iran’s leaders that they are not being singled out for rebuke.

Sarkozy said his country would take some detainees from the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as the Obama administration has asked.

Obama said he and Sarkozy will work “in close collaboration” on many issues, including anti-terrorism strategy.

He also said the United States has authorized all of the government’s resources to investigate an Air France plane that disappeared off the coast of South America.

Investigators are searching for debris from Air France Flight 447, which lost contact with officials on June 1 during a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. Two Americans were aboard the 228-person flight.

1. House prices will keep falling in most places because those prices are still dangerously high compared to incomes and rents. Banks say a safe mortgage is a maximum of 3 times the buyer’s yearly income. Landlords say a safe price is a maximum of 15 times the tenant’s yearly rent. Yet in coastal areas, both those safety rules are still being violated. Buyers are still borrowing 6 times their income, and sellers are still asking 30 times annual rent, even after recent price declines. Renting is a cash business that reflects what people can really pay, not how much they can borrow. Salaries and rents prove that prices will keep falling for a long time. Anyone who bought a “bargain” this time last year is already sitting on a very painful loss.
2. It’s still much cheaper to rent than to own the same thing. On the coasts, yearly rents are less than 3% of purchase price and mortgage rates are 6%, so it costs twice as much to borrow money for a mortgage than it does to borrow (rent) the house itself. Worse, total owner costs including taxes, maintenance, and insurance come to about 9% of purchase price, which is three times the cost of renting. Buying a house is still a very bad deal for the buyer on the coasts, but it does make sense to buy in Michigan and some other places where prices have fallen into line with salaries and rents. Check whether you should rent or buy in your own area with this NY Times calculator.The bottom will be here when buying a house to rent out clearly makes money. At that point it’s justified to buy because rent can cover the mortgage and all expenses if necessary, eliminating much of the risk. For a rough indication of the wisdom of buying a house, look at the yearly-rent/price ratio for the model of house in question:

   3% = do not buy
   6% = borderline
   9% = ok to buy

3. It’s a terrible time to buy when interest rates are low, like now. Realtors just lie without shame about this fundamental fact. Prices fall as interest rates rise, because a given monthly payment covers a smaller mortgage at a higher interest rate. Since interest rates have nowhere to go but up, prices have nowhere to go but down. The way to win the game is to have cash on hand to buy outright at a low price when others cannot borrow very much because of high interest rates. To buy at a time of very low interest rates is a mistake.It is definitely far better to pay a low price with a high interest rate than a high price with a low interest rate, even if the mortgage payment is the same either way.
   • First of all, your property taxes will be lower with a low purchase price.
   • Second, a low price gives you the ability to pay it all off instead of being a debt-slave forever.
   • Third, prices will definitely fall as interest rates rise — so paying a high price may trap you “under water”. Then you will not be able to refinance, and won’t be able to sell without a loss. Even if you get a long-term fixed rate mortgage, when rates inevitably go up the value of your property will go down. A low price minimizes this possibility.
4. The US economy will not recover until house prices are allowed to fall to prices buyers can easily pay on a normal salary. The primary evil in the economy is housing “affordability” programs which encourage debt, making prices higher, not lower. True affordability is not more debt — true affordability is lower prices. The government’s false affordability programs have created more debt than can ever possibly be repaid. Credit rating agencies lied about the value of this debt, scaring off investors.When house prices finally fall to affordable levels, and foolish lenders and foolish borrowers are finally allowed to fail, then the economy will work again: there will be investment based on real production instead of on financial speculation, jobs will be created, and money will be earned and spent. Currently, we have no investment because the government is punishing savers and investors with policies that waste their honestly earned money to cover the foolish gambling losses of others.
5. Prices disconnected from Gross Domestic Product. The value of housing in the US depends a lot on the value of what the US actually produces. Not only is the GDP decreasing, jobs are being lost in large numbers. It does not make sense to buy when more jobs will be lost and the price people can pay will decrease. Unemployment drives housing prices down. It also does not make sense to buy when your own job is in danger.
6. Buyers borrowed too much money and cannot pay the interest. Now there are mass foreclosures, and Congress is taking a trillion dollars of your money to pay the mortgage investment losses for banks. The plan is to overpay the banks for bad mortgages, claiming that this will support the housing market. It will not work, since bank profits have nothing to do with housing prices.We also have legal contracts being modified to stop even well-justified foreclosures. No one was forced to borrow money. It was a choice — a very bad choice, but completely voluntary. Grownups should be responsible for their own actions. To prevent a justified foreclosure is also to prevent a deserving family from buying that house at a low price, not to mention what this does to faith in contract law. No one in government or the press will even mention that everyone in foreclosure trouble got themselves into that spot by voluntarily borrowing too much money. Debt is the cause of massive evil.Should taxes be used to pay the debts of irresponsible borrowers, no matter how much they over-borrowed or overpaid for a house? Should savers be forced to pay the debts of other people who cannot afford “their homes” no matter what price they paid or how far it is beyond their actual financial means? If so, go buy the most expensive house you can right now! Borrow as much as you possibly can and don’t pay it back, knowing that Congress will force the real repayment obligation onto others, onto people who are living within their means.Banks happily loaned whatever amount borrowers wanted as long as the banks could then sell the loan, pushing the default risk onto Fannie Mae (taxpayers) or onto buyers of mortgage-backed bonds. Now that it has become clear that a trillion dollars in foolish mortgage loans will not be repaid, Fannie Mae is under pressure not to buy risky loans and investors do not want mortgage-backed bonds. This means that the money available for mortgages is falling, and house prices will keep falling, probably for another five years or more. This is not just a subprime problem. All mortgages will be harder to get.A return to traditional lending standards means a return to traditional prices, which are far below current prices.
7. Extreme use of leverage. Leverage means using debt to amplify gain. Most people forget that losses get amplified as well. If a buyer puts 10% down and the house goes down 10%, he has lost 100% of his money on paper. If he has to sell due to job loss or an interest rate hike, he’s bankrupt in the real world.It’s worse than that. House prices do not even have to fall to cause big losses. The cost of selling a house is 6% because of the realtor lobby’s corruption of US legislators. On a $300,000 house, that’s $18,000 lost even if prices just stay flat. So a 4% decline in housing prices bankrupts all those with 10% equity or less.
8. Shortage of first-time buyers. From The Herald: “We were all corrupted by the housing boom, to some extent. People talked endlessly about how their houses were earning more than they did, never asking where all this free money was coming from. Well the truth is that it was being stolen from the next generation. Houses price increases don’t produce wealth, they merely transfer it from the young to the old - from the coming generation of families who have to burden themselves with colossal debts if they want to own, to the baby boomers who are about to retire and live on the cash they make when they downsize.”High house prices have been very unfair to new families, especially those with children. It is literally impossible for them to buy at current prices, yet government leaders never talk about how lower house prices are good for pretty much everyone except bankers, instead preferring to sacrifice American families to make sure bankers have plenty of debt to earn interest on. If you own a house and ever want to upgrade, you benefit from falling prices because you’ll save more on your next house than you’ll lose in selling your current house. Every “affordability” program drives prices higher by pushing buyers deeper into debt. To really help Americans, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be completely eliminated, along with the mortgage-interest deduction. Canada has no mortgage-interest deduction at all, and has a more affordable and stable housing market because of that.The government keeps house prices unaffordably high through programs that increase buyer debt, and then pretends to be interested in affordable housing. No one in government except Ron Paul ever talks about the obvious solution: less debt and lower house prices. The real result of every “affordability” program is to keep you in debt for the rest of your life so that you have to keep working. Lower house prices would liberate millions of people from decades of labor each. There is never anything in the press about the millions of people that were hurt and continue to be hurt by high house prices.The government pretends to be interested in affordable housing, but now that housing is becoming affordable, they want to stop it? Their actions speak louder than their words.
9. Surplus of speculators. Nationally, 25% of houses bought the last few years were pure speculation, not houses to live in, and the speculators are going into foreclosure in large numbers now. Even the National Association of House Builders admits that “Investor-driven price appreciation looms over some housing markets.”
10. Deflation. There is fear of inflation, but it’s not likely in the next few years. The actual amount of money created by the Fed lately is a trillion dollars, which sounds huge, but is small compared to the $10 trillion drop in housing “values” and another $10 trillion drop in stock market capitalization. The US government will not print extreme amounts of cash like Zimbabwe did, because significant inflation would mean that foreigners would no longer lend money to the US government unless interest rates were much higher to compensate them for inflation losses. Higher interest rates would push more people with adjustable mortgages over the edge. The most likely scenario is like Japan: low inflation and low interest rates, with falling house prices for years to come.
11. Fraud. It was common for speculators take out a loan for up to 50% more than the price of the house. The appraiser went along with the inflated price, or he did not ever get called back to do another appraisal. The speculator then paid the seller his asking price (much less than the loan amount), and used the extra money to make mortgage payments on the unreasonably large mortgage until he could find a buyer to take the house off his hands for more than he paid. Worked great during the boom. Now it doesn’t work at all, unless the speculator simply skips town with the extra money.
12. Baby boomers retiring. There are 77 million Americans born between 1946-1964. One-third have zero retirement savings. The oldest are 62. The only money they have is equity in a house, so they must sell.
13. Huge glut of empty housing. Builders are being forced to drop prices even faster than owners. Builders have huge excess inventory that they cannot sell, and more houses are completed each day, making the housing slump worse.
14. The best summary explanation, from Business Week: “Today’s housing prices are predicated on an impossible combination: the strong growth in income and asset values of a strong economy, plus the ultra-low interest rates of a weak economy. Either the economy’s long-term prospects will get worse or rates will rise. In either scenario, housing will weaken.”

Continue Reading Patrick Killelea’s explanation of the housing situation> (new window)

If your reaction is one of incredulity, with the temptation to write off such a dire mega-financial event as a fringe-group fantasy, think again. Witness what some otherwise boring yet highly respected accountants and bankers have been saying recently about the exploding indebtedness of the United States.

David M. Walker served as the Comptroller-General of the United States from 1998 to 2008. In his capacity as the chief congressional financial watchdog, Walker warned long before the onset of the current financial and economic crisis that the nation faced more than $50 trillion in unfunded obligations due to Medicare and Social Security. Rather than allocating revenue to ensure these future liabilities were fully funded, Congress and the federal government have done exactly the opposite. Not only has no funding provision been made for these two major entitlement programs; while Medicare and Social Security have been in surplus their revenue stream has been used to artificially deflate the actual government deficit. Unfortunately, this shell game will come to an end in only a few years, when both programs enter into extreme and growing deficits of their own. And the figure of $50 trillion in unfunded liabilities, separate and apart from the U.S. government’s official national debt of more than $11 trillion, is already outdated by a cascading avalanche of dire financial news.

Richard W. Fisher, President of the Dallas Federal Reserve, delivered a speech to the Commonwealth Club of California back in May, and revealed that the authentic national debt of the United States, using generally accepted accounting principals, was nearly $100 trillion! Putting this surreal as well as apocalyptic number in perspective, Fisher said, “With a total population of 304 million, from infants to the elderly, the per-person payment to the federal treasury would come to $330,000. This comes to $1.3 million per family of four, over 25 times the average household’s income.”

It is in the context of an already fragile fiscal architecture that the Obama administration and Congress are unleashing a torrent of unprecedented debt. The rationale is that this must be done, or the economy will crater. For the sake of short-term moderation of the worst ravages of the Global Economic Crisis, an already disastrous fiscal posture is being stampeded towards unmitigated catastrophe. Yet, the political leadership still claims it is committed to fiscal responsibility and that once the economy recovers and strong economic growth is restored, the deficit will shrink as a proportion of the nation’s GDP. Does anyone still believe these political promises of a new era of fiscal discipline that surely awaits us just around the bend?

There is mounting evidence that America’s primary overseas creditors are no longer easily fooled. Their collective skepticism is mounting, as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner discovered recently on his beggar’s expedition to China. The policymakers in Beijing are shifting their sovereign fund investments from U.S. Treasuries to commodities as a clear indication of their growing concern about the staggering level of indebtedness of the United States. And they are not the only major global financial actors to manifest a growing level of unease at Uncle Sam’s ballooning debt.

The Co-Chief Investment Officer at Pacific Investment Management Company, otherwise known as Pimco, is Bill Gross. He is one of the most important individuals on the planet at this time of global crisis, as Pimco manages the world’s largest bond fund. It is through the bond market that sovereigns finance their national debt. This is what he had to say about the credibility of the Washington political establishment on its claimed intent to restore fiscal sanity:

While policymakers, including the President and Treasury Secretary Geithner, assure voters and financial markets alike that such a path is unsustainable and that a return to fiscal conservatism is just around the recovery’s corner, it is hard to comprehend exactly how that more balanced rabbit can be pulled out of Washington’s hat.

Undoubtedly, Mr. Gross is correct. There is no rabbit to pull out of a magician’s hat. Which leaves just three alternatives for resolving America’s fiscal imbalance: 1. Raise taxes exorbitantly and/or drastically cut government expenditures 2. Unleash hyperinflation to reduce the real value of the national debt — and destroy the value of the currency in the process 3. Default on the national debt.

Defaulting on the national debt, which in effect is a declaration of U.S. insolvency, would have tectonic ramifications for the entire global system. Financial and economic power, international relations and strategic alliances would be altered so radically, the world that would ultimately emerge would be vastly different from the one we know today. While its exact composition cannot be predicted, it is a rule of history that great powers that go bankrupt lose their great power status.

Do any members of the Washington political establishment actually reflect on the long-term implications of the untenable fiscal policies they have authorized with their votes? If there are, they are sadly too few in numbers.

At least 25 children and five employees were hospitalized after Friday’s fire in ABC day care in the city of Hermosillo, said Jose Larrinaga, a spokesman for investigators in the state of Sonora, which borders Arizona.

Some of the injured suffered severe burns and might be taken to U.S. hospitals, Sonora Gov. Eduardo Bours said.

“For now, we’re concentrating on saving as many kids as possible,” he said.

There were about 100 children in the day care at the time, with ages ranging from six months to 5 years, said Guadalupe Ayala, coordinator of Red Cross rescue workers.

Reforma newspaper reported that the building was a converted factory with no emergency exits. Ayala said the day care’s exits were inadequate but did not have further details.

“Firefighters had to knock holes in the walls to get the children,” he said.

Authorities have identified 27 of the 31 children killed, according to a Sonora government statement Saturday.

The fire may have started at a neighboring tire and car warehouse Friday afternoon, state officials said. Firefighters took two hours to control the blaze, the cause of which was still unconfirmed.

Most the children died from of asphyxiation or smoke inhalation.

Neighbors rushed to help pull out the children as screaming preschool teachers ran through thick clouds of black smoke, Reforma newspaper reported.

Sobbing parents flooded hospitals, desperate for news about their children.

Photographs showed the sidewalk outside the day care strewn with upturned, slightly blackened baby seats and cribs. Cribs also could been seen through huge holes punched through the walls.

The Mexican government sent a team of 15 burn specialists, three air ambulances, and other medical equipment, President Felipe Calderon said. Mexico’s Social Security Institute outsourced services to the privately run day care.

Calderon said he ordered an investigation by Mexico’s attorney general.

Building safety violations have been blamed for previous disasters in Mexico.

In 2000, a fire killed 21 people at a glitzy Mexico City disco that only had one available exit, lacked smoke detectors and did not have enough fire extinguishers. Many of the dead were found near the club’s emergency exit, which was locked with a chain. More than 140 nightclubs were closed for code violations after that fire.

Last year, 12 people died a botched police raid at another Mexico City nightclub. Officers blocked the overcrowded club’s lone working exit, creating a deadly stampede in which nine patrons and three police died in the rush to get out. The emergency exits had been blocked.

___

Associated Press Writer Julie Watson contributed to this report.

For all its well-intentioned rhetoric, President Obama’s speech was, sadly, conceptually flawed, empirically challenged, and politically blind to the daily realities that drive hundreds of millions of Muslims to increasing despair.

Conceptually, the President’s goal was clearly to help correct the mistaken notion shared by so many Muslims and Americans of the notion of an essential conflict between them. He even spoke of Islam, rightly, as being “always part of America.”

But such rhetoric was overshadowed by the use of language and themes that hew closely to the long-held notion of “Islam” and the “West” as being two essentially different and civilizations traveling on separate historical trajectories.

To bridge the rift between them, Obama had first to establish a deep, centuries-long tension driven by “historical forces that go beyond any current policy debate.” Islam “carried the light of learning” and “paved the way” for modernity and globalization, but it did not participate directly in their birth or development. Instead, modernity and the “sweeping change” it brought “led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.”

This idea of an essentially European modernity forcing its way into hostile Muslim territory is belied by the historical record. Indeed, the banking, credit and trading systems that fueled modern capitalism were born in Muslim-led trading systems of the Mediterranean. And where possible Muslims adopted the latest developments, from weapons to steam engines to agricultural technologies, as soon as they became available.

Yet however inaccurate, such a dualistic narrative serves an important rhetorical function in the President’s larger argument. With a gap so wide, he can rightly argue that “change cannot happen overnight.” Indeed, before the speech Senior Adviser David Axelrod explained that the breach would likely take more than one administration to heal.

In fact, change could happen overnight; and the policies necessary to achieve it are simple and easily implemented — precisely because Muslims and Americans share so many of the same values when it comes to respect for democracy, human rights, and the rule of Law.

But change will only happen if President Obama takes seriously what most Muslim have long said, not merely “behind closed doors,” but in the open and to anyone who will listen.

Here I’m reminded here of President Reagan’s historic speech at the Berlin Wall, almost 22 years ago to the day, on June 12, 1987, where he exclaimed: “There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace… Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

This is the kind of language Obama needed to use in his speech. He needed to demand that the autocrats and occupiers of the region end their oppression, open the doors of their prisons and tear down their walls, and allow the peoples of the region to live in peace, freedom and democracy. And he needed to put the muscle and money of US foreign policy behind those words, the same way Reagan did in confronting the Soviet Union.

First and foremost, President Obama should have announced that the United States would stop providing political, economic and military support to corrupt and brutal authoritarian regimes, without exception. This goes for occupiers like Israel (and, one could add, India in Kashmir and Morocco in the Western Sahara) and governments of key allies such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt — where thousands of activists have been harassed, imprisoned, tortured, burned and even killed by security forces without any fear US retribution, and will continue to suffer once Mr. Obama leaves.

Sadly, the President has offered little tangible support for some of Egypt’s most important dissident voices, such as Ayman Nour, the one-time presidential candidate recently released from prison, who a bit over a week ago was almost burned to death by government thugs. Instead, he and his most senior advisors regularly praise Mubarak’s “leadership” in an unending peace process that brings billions of dollars of aid and political support to his government, while well over 30 million of his compatriots live in dire poverty. Obama’s effective silence on these issues is deafening to a generation of young Egyptians desperate to move beyond the current system and realize their natural, and national potential in a free society.

Instead of making concrete demands on President Mubarak and other regional leaders regarding freedom, democracy, human rights, and committing the US to a major shift in our policies on those issues, President Obama argued that the first step to healing the US-Islamic divide must be to “confront violent extremism in all of its forms.” What the President doesn’t realize is that from the standpoint of the peoples of the Middle East, US support for governments like Israel, Egypt and other authoritarian regimes, along with our invasion of Iraq — which despite his pledge to “speak the truth” he refused to admit was wrong — have been as extreme and violent as those of militant Islam.

He should have admitted that the Iraq invasion was flat-out wrong, not merely a “war of choice,” and apologized for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed and untold billions of dollars of their wealth and resources destroyed.

When it comes to Israel and Palestine, the President’s words do mark a significant shift in tone from the rhetoric of his predecessors, especially his placing Palestine on equal footing with Israel as a nation deserving independence and sovereignty. But hearing them I couldn’t help thinking that they constituted the speech President Clinton should have given sixteen years ago at the start of the Oslo peace process.

Back then, when there were only a bit more than 100,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank, calling for a “stop” to settlements made sense. Today, with nearly triple the population and having rendered huge swaths of the West Bank permanently off limits to Palestinians, it is a decade too late. Stopping settlement construction will still leave the West Bank a mishmash of Palestinian islands that cannot form the nuclear of a sovereign state.

Nothing less than the dismantlement of the majority of settlements, bypass roads and checkpoints, will allow for the creation of a territorially viable Palestinian state. Muslim listeners to his speech understand that unless the President is willing to force Israel to choose between the settlements and continued US patronage, peace will remain impossible to achieve.

Mr. Obama has a steep learning curve before he can hope to fulfill the lofty rhetoric of his speech in Cairo. He seems unaware that the best and perhaps only way to get the peoples of the Muslim world to support US goals such as preventing Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons, pacifying Afghanistan, and stamping out violent Islamism is to hold all the peoples of the region and their leaders, without exception, to one, easily measurable standard.

Unless his words are matched by a rapid and profound shift in the strategic calculus underlying American foreign policy, Obama’s speech will be remembered as little more than “haki fadi,” or empty talk, and peace in the Middle East — and with it America’s quest for a better relationship with the people of the Muslim world — will remain an illusive dream.

Much of the Israeli media commentary is conducted in Hebrew, but key outlets offer English editions and translations. These sources provide Americans with a window into the debates occurring across Israel’s dominant Jewish majority.

In the hours after Obama concluded his speech, Israeli commentators were particularly struck by his implicit linkage of Palestinian aspirations and other global struggles for freedom. While the relevant sections of Obama’s speech were built around criticism of Palestinian violence, Israeli commentators read them more closely than did many American pundits. In Obama’s original words:

Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia.

This tidy framing by President Obama skillfully avoids the role of America’s bloody Civil War in ending slavery. But setting that aside, the implied link between Palestinians and historically oppressed populations elsewhere did not escape comment in major Israeli newspapers. In the liberal newspaper Ha’aretz, journalist Akiva Eldar wrote:

Obama placed violence against Israel on a par with the settlements and the humiliation of Palestinians in the territories. He spoke in the same breath about the struggle of Palestinians who lost their homes more than 60 years ago and the struggle of African slaves in the U.S. The Israelis could see themselves in the sentence that mentioned the apartheid state of South Africa.

The full editorial board of Ha’aretz also weighed in:

As such, Obama does not consider some more equal than others. The right of Israel to exist as an independent and sovereign state does not supersede that of the Palestinians. The suffering and humiliation of the Palestinians under occupation are unacceptable, and therefore they must be granted human and political rights; no less unacceptable is the condition of Israeli citizens who live under the threat of rockets.

Meanwhile, the more conservative Jerusalem Post editorialized against Obama’s comments:

…we cringed when he associated the Palestinian struggle with the US civil rights movement and with the campaign for majority rule in South Africa — even if the punch-line of this false analogy was: Terrorism is always unjustifiable.

President Obama’s continued call for a two-state solution and an end to settlements also generated significant Israeli media comment. One source was Ynetnews, an online English-language news source owned by Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s largest newspaper. Ynetnews reporter Attila Somfalvi analyzed the implications of Obama’s Cairo comments for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:

For Netanyahu, this is a major junction that offers only two directions: A collision course with the world’s greatest power, which will lead to Israel’s isolation and ostracism in the international arena - or a dramatic policy shift that will exact difficult political prices. In other words: The prime minister must decide whether he’s going with Likud’s more rightist members, or with Obama.

One of the most interesting reactions focused on a single sentence in Obama’s speech. It wasn’t the comment itself that was so thought-provoking, but the broader issue it related to. Professor Gerald M. Steinberg of Bar-Ilan University responded harshly in the Jerusalem Post Online to Obama’s comments regarding Hamas:

The call for Hamas - the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood - to act responsibly to “put an end to violence” and “recognize Israel’s right to exist” is extremely far fetched, even for Obama. Hamas belongs in the first part of the speech, which focused on confronting “violent extremism in all of its forms,” including al-Qaida and the Taliban.

What Steinberg was referring to was a single carefully-crafted sentence in Obama’s speech. Though the words were strategically structured as a criticism of violence, they contained something even more interesting. Tucked between commas was a recognition that Hamas must be a part of any successful peace process:

[Emphasis added] To play a role in fulfilling Palestinian aspirations, and to unify the Palestinian people, Hamas must put an end to violence, recognize past agreements, and recognize Israel’s right to exist.

Steinberg’s comments reflect a fear of this necessary reality — that Hamas must be included in the solution. In the days ahead, more fears are likely to be expressed. But for Israel and a viable Palestinian state to coexist, Hamas has to be part of the process.

More on Obama Mideast Trip

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Robert Mueller, who was appointed by Bush in 2001 and remains FBI director under Obama, delivered that assessment at the end of this December 2008 article in Vanity Fair on torture:

I ask Mueller: So far as he is aware, have any attacks on America been disrupted thanks to intelligence obtained through what the administration still calls “enhanced techniques”?

“I’m really reluctant to answer that,” Mueller says. He pauses, looks at an aide, and then says quietly, declining to elaborate: “I don’t believe that has been the case.”

That stands in direct contrast to Dick Cheney’s recent claim that torture has been “enormously valuable” in terms of “preventing another mass-casualty attack against the United States.”

You’d think that this sort of thing would throw a bit of a wrench into the Bushies’ campaign. But as Charles Kaiser notes, these types of statements haven’t really broken through the media din.

On that score, it’s worth asking why the White House and its allies aren’t pushing back a bit harder on the Bushies’ claims. Yes, this is a debate that the White House would like to avoid. But Cheney and other Bush administration officials have launched a major campaign here that shows no signs whatsoever of abating.

Whatever downsides Cheney’s constant public appearances hold for the GOP, the Bushies seem to be having some success shifting the debate onto the narrow question of whether torture “worked.” Shouldn’t we be seeing more push-back from the White House or its outside allies?

Pelosi told reporters that the administration officials only told her and those in a classified briefing in the fall of 2002 that they believed they had the legal authority to do so, based on Office of Legal Counsel memos which have recently been released by the Obama administration.

“In that or any other briefing…we were not, and I repeat, were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation techniques were used,” said Pelosi. “What they did tell us is that they had some legislative counsel…opinions that they could be used, but not that they would.”

Pelosi said that the officials promised to inform Congress if they ever did waterboard a detainee, but never did so. Her assertion contradicts a recently released Senate committee report that cited CIA records to claim that senior members of Congress in both parties were briefed on the waterboarding, which had already been done to detainee Abu Zubaydah. Pelosi, in the strongest terms should could conjure, said the report was untrue and that she never approved, tacitly or otherwise, the waterboarding of detainees.

“Further to the point was that if and when they would be used, they would brief Congress at that time,” said Pelosi. “I know that there’s some different interpretations coming out of that meeting. My colleague, the chairman of the [intelligence] committee, has said, well if they say that it’s legal you have to know they’re going to use it. Well, his experience is that he was a member of the CIA and later went on to head the CIA. Maybe his experience is that they’ll tell you one thing but may mean something else.”

Pelosi is referring to then-GOP Rep. Porter Goss. “My experience was they did not tell us they were using that, flat out. And any, any contention to the contrary is simply not true,” she said.

Republicans have recently been making the case that if Democrats insist on investigating torture, they must own up to their own culpability for remaining silent. Pelosi’s insistence that she wasn’t briefed on the occurrence of waterboarding is an effort to push back on that offensive.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) also pushed back against the GOP Thursday. “They know that this is all Cheney-driven and are making excuses,” Reid told the Huffington Post.